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Galaxy S IV shown in leaked video, alongside audio of iPad mini promo

Samsung's unreleased phone gets an earful of Jony Ive.

A video of a shadowy figure fondling the upcoming Galaxy S IV has leaked to the forum 52Samsung. The man (?) pokes around the Android operating system, apparently still skinned with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI overlay, as the iPad mini promo from Apple’s October 2012 keynote plays on a TV screen above and behind him.

The Galaxy S IV he handles is similar in size and shape to the Galaxy S III released around this time last year, coming in black with a silver band around the edge that may or may not be real chrome this time. The user turns on the phone, briefly uses the camera to take some photos in burst mode, and then trawls through the settings to show the OS version number—Android 4.2.1—among other things.

Some other details about Samsung’s next release leaked Monday in photos of the phone, and it appears to feature some of the specs we crave. The Galaxy S IV looks to have a 5-inch 1080p display, an eight-core Exynos 5 Octa 5410 SoC, 2GB of RAM, and an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544 GPU. The photos may be from the same person who filmed the video.

While the video reveals little that is new about the phone, the juxtaposition of Samsung’s next big thing with Apple’s next big thing from five months ago is hard not to notice. Either the man was watching the announcement live back in October, or he was watching an archived version of it later on. For inspiration? For hate-driven motivation? Out of boredom? Out of curiosity? The world may never know. Either way, these announcements are much more interesting and informative than Samsung's official series of commercials featuringa little boy named Jeremy which are meant to drum up excitement for the phone.

Samsung is set to formally announce the Galaxy S IV on March 14, where we will be on the ground reporting live from Radio City Music Hall in New York.

Samsung Galaxy S IV leaked video.

Promoted Comments

It's not the same. 8 cores doesn't mean it uses all 8 at the same time to crunch data. If I remember right not all 8 cores are running at the same power nor are they all used at the same time. It's a power saving scheme.

1327 posts | registered Oct 16, 2012

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

Well technically speaking, if I'm understanding the CPU architecture correctly, I don't think there are ever more than four cores active at once - there are four pairs of one high-power core and one low-power core that it will switch between as necessary depending on the current workload.

I have seen people speculate that this is all an elaborate hoax pulled by Samsung (since they fooled everyone last year as well). If that is the case, I would further speculate that the iPad mini promo playing in the background is Samsung's way of poking a bit of fun at Apple's inability to keep its own new products a secret.

I'm not saying I believe this, but it would be kind of clever. We'll know in two days.

I'm not sure what people were expecting. The GS3 form factor was a huge success, and is currently less than a year old. I'd have been astonished (and still will be) if Samsung makes radical changes to it. And fundamentally, phone chassis are very strongly dictated by their functionality. There's a limit to what new directions you can travel when you need a large touchscreen no matter what.

When I got my first GS3, it seemed that it was set to wait something like 1/3 a second between clicks before launching things or executing presses. There is a setting to reduce that to 0 somewhere in the system menu. I can't remember what it was, but that is probably responsible for the issues shown. I know when I changed that it made all that perceived sluggishness/delay disappear.

That being said, I was happy once I got around to removing samsung's junk and CM10 running. :-)

It's not the same. 8 cores doesn't mean it uses all 8 at the same time to crunch data. If I remember right not all 8 cores are running at the same power nor are they all used at the same time. It's a power saving scheme.

Off topic, but I hate it when people film in portrait mode. Unless your watching it on a phone in portrait mode it's a complete waste of space and looks terrible.

Probably, because handling a phone in portrait position is more convenient and less tiresome for many people. Actually, I would personally prefer a phone that at least allows proper shooting of videos in portrait position, since the video-frame barely needs all the surface of the image sensor. Screens are big enough already, so not much real estate would be missed.

Nice looking phone overall. It looks like the GS4 is less rounded at the corners and the chrome/aluminium bezel is more shiny and prominent that then GS3. I hate touchwiz with passion, remember folks, with Android you have a choice of what launcher you want to use, for me, installing Apex Launcher Pro is the very first thing I do on this new phone.

8 cores on a smartphone don't work like 8 cores on your desktop machine. VERY different.

That has nothing to do with it. You can make a responsive UI by smarter software. For example you do not do your number crunching networking etc on your UI thread and you give the user something to look at so that it feels faster than it really is. That is how you do responsive UI. A OS with a scheduler that is more tuned to UI also helps.

It's not the same. 8 cores doesn't mean it uses all 8 at the same time to crunch data. If I remember right not all 8 cores are running at the same power nor are they all used at the same time. It's a power saving scheme.

and don't forget that to use all cores available, whether it is a pc or phone ot even a tablet, requires software built to utilize it. My pc as well does not fully utilize all cores unless I run Solid Works..so...

Eight total cores on the processor, never more than 4 active at any one time. It has four ARM A15 cores and four ARM A7 cores. Only one set of 4 cores is enabled at any one time. The A7 cores are used for lighter workloads to save power, while the A15's are power gated and consuming no power.

The A15 cores are enabled and the A7 cores powered down when there is a heavy workload such as gaming, etc.

Eight total cores on the processor, never more than 4 active at any one time. It has four ARM A15 cores and four ARM A7 cores. Only one set of 4 cores is enabled at any one time. The A7 cores are used for lighter workloads to save power, while the A15's are power gated and consuming no power.

The A15 cores are enabled and the A7 cores powered down when there is a heavy workload such as gaming, etc.

Ok then...

Four active cores and it still has that much UI lag?

For chrissake, we didn't even have quad core processors in our desktop computers until the last few years (not counting servers) and they still can't get the thing to be totally responsive? I recently fired up the much-less powerful first generation iPod Touch I handed down to my mom and the touch responsiveness was like the content was stuck to my finger. Samsung or Google, I don't care who's responsible, this is just ridiculous.

Eight total cores on the processor, never more than 4 active at any one time. It has four ARM A15 cores and four ARM A7 cores. Only one set of 4 cores is enabled at any one time. The A7 cores are used for lighter workloads to save power, while the A15's are power gated and consuming no power.

The A15 cores are enabled and the A7 cores powered down when there is a heavy workload such as gaming, etc.

Ok then...

Four active cores and it still has that much UI lag?

For chrissake, we didn't even have quad core processors in our desktop computers until the last few years (not counting servers) and they still can't get the thing to be totally responsive? I recently fired up the much-less powerful first generation iPod Touch I handed down to my mom and the touch responsiveness was like the content was stuck to my finger. Samsung or Google, I don't care who's responsible, this is just ridiculous.

A point too often missed.

Responsiveness can be done with a single core. If a phone UI can't manage it with that, it's shoddy coding.

Eight total cores on the processor, never more than 4 active at any one time. It has four ARM A15 cores and four ARM A7 cores. Only one set of 4 cores is enabled at any one time. The A7 cores are used for lighter workloads to save power, while the A15's are power gated and consuming no power.

The A15 cores are enabled and the A7 cores powered down when there is a heavy workload such as gaming, etc.

Ok then...

Four active cores and it still has that much UI lag?

For chrissake, we didn't even have quad core processors in our desktop computers until the last few years (not counting servers) and they still can't get the thing to be totally responsive? I recently fired up the much-less powerful first generation iPod Touch I handed down to my mom and the touch responsiveness was like the content was stuck to my finger. Samsung or Google, I don't care who's responsible, this is just ridiculous.